The Social Media Trend That Mocks Toxic Masculinity and Homophobia

The dog-in-a-rainbow meme is often used to tauntingly speculate on someone’s sexuality on social media. And in the past several days, it trended as what started out as a perpetuation of homophobia and toxic masculinity and homophobia turned on its heel to mockingly point out the ridiculousness of these structures that hold up masculinity and to question their validity.

Some days ago on Twitter, a user went viral when he tweeted about how irritated he gets by male friends who say “good morning” and “how was your night” to him in the morning. The tweet, apart from getting lauded by some male tweeters as a characteristic of masculinity (since, apparently polite manners and concerned enquiries amongst friends is a “feminine” attribute), drew the ire and mockery of other users who pointed out the toxicity in male friendships that do not welcome such mundane acts of niceness.

And since anything that is not perceived to be masculine is eschewed as “feminine” or “gay”, social media has been bursting with all sorts of memes that show just how nonsensical these preconceived notions of masculinity can be.

And just when you thought the womenfolk escaped the scourge of this hilarious trend, the following memes popped up: